Load Balancing Techniques for Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are evolving to be the key technology for next generation wireless networking because of its advantage over other wireless technologies. However, many challenging technical issues still exist in this field to be addressed. Network load balancing is one of the important challenges in WMNs. As because the traffic volume in a WMN is expected to be very high, load balancing becomes a crucial part of it. Network load balancing enhances the scalability and availability of network. Load balancing can be used to extend the lifetime of a Mesh Network. In a WMN, where multiple paths to the destination node are very common, load balancing is the best approach to increase network throughput and to reduce congestion. In order to provide a better understanding of the load balancing challenges of WMNs, this paper presents a detailed investigation of the various load balancing techniques for WMNs that has been proposed so far.